The Art of Screenplays: A Writer's Guide

The Art of Screenplays is a working handbook for writers with stories to tell. Addressing the key issues of creativity and craft, its aim is to connect with our natural understanding of story, to demystify the screenwriter’s art, and to enable fresh, original and authentic writing. Working on the central premise that drama reflects nature, and screenplays simply echo life as we know it, the areas Mukherjee discusses include:

•  The writer’s eye. How to gather, ferment and communicate story.

•  The art of action. Understanding structure through observation.

•  Who am I? Exploring the levels of characters.

•  Vertical structure. Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

•  Speak the speech. The art of not writing dialogue.

Robin Mukherjee has written extensively for theatre, television, radio and film. His television work includes many well-known series, for which he has been a core writer, including Eastenders, The Bill, Casualty, The Roman Mysteries and Medics, along with critically acclaimed serials and features. His first feature film won the Audience Award at the London Film Festival. His most recent feature, Lore, has won numerous awards worldwide and was nominated for an Australian Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His television serial Combat Kids, was recently nominated for a BAFTA for Best Children’s Drama.

For Tony Dinner – mentor, friend and

lasting inspiration to so many writers.

And to all my students over the years,

from whom I have learned so much.

While the main laws of strategy can be stated clearly enough for the benefit of all and sundry, you must be guided by the actions of the enemy in attempting to secure a favourable position in actual warfare.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

CONTENTS

Introduction

ONCE UPON A TIME IN YOUR HEAD

SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER

STUFF

IDEAS

STRUCTURE

WORKING WITH STRUCTURE

LEITMOTIF – THE USE OF THINGS

CHARACTER

DIALOGUE

STYLE AND RESONANCE

Conclusion

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Overheard in a café:

GIRL 1

(Munching on a cake)

So I was like, ‘You know, I’m just saying, you do that – yeah? – and it’s gonna come down, like, really on hard you.’ And she was like, ‘Wha’? What’s it to do wiv you?’ And I says, ‘But it’s Neil, you know, he’s like my bro’ in he?’, and she was, ‘Huh? You and Neil?’ I says, ‘No, I said he’s like my bro’, yeah?’ And then she goes…

(Sits back, folding her arms)

…‘Oh, I see.’

GIRL 2

You and Neil?

GIRL 1

Well… yeah.

(Giggles)

Just the once.

Girl 1 might not have known it, but, in her construction of narrative and portrayal of character to evoke a moment and convey a point, she was writing a script. If you had asked her (which I wouldn’t have dared), she would probably have acknowledged that she was telling a story. And, much as the grammatical purist might question her use of language, I couldn’t help feeling a sneaking envy for the skills with which she commanded the attention of her audience. It’s possible that she was a recent graduate of some intensive course in scriptwriting, or that the bookshelves of her bedroom sagged with voluminous tomes on the subject. But I doubt it. I’m sure she watches TV and possibly the odd movie, but the question is: without a formal grounding in the art of dramatic composition, how was she able to tell a story? Moreover, why would she want to? And why was her friend so captivated – apart from a personal involvement with some of the circumstances and our perennial fascination with scandal?

Girl 1 knew what she wanted to say (in between mouthfuls of pastry). She understood the central characters, and she was possessed by the emotional content of her tale. She needed only to let these dynamics operate to provide the entertainment her friend so enjoyed. Of course, there is a leap from the act of conveying an anecdote to the finessing of a professional screenplay, but the elements remain the same. Beyond formatting issues, structural niceties, editing of dialogue, and authentic character construction, our natural understanding of storytelling is enough to get us a long way, from title sequence to end credits.

Like anything, a story unfolds according to a mix of creativity and knowledge; which is to say, its need to exist and the form by which it can function. Story is, by nature, a structured phenomenon, just as any event worth relating has a pattern of sorts. We know quite a lot about character, because most of us are characters. Dialogue is speech, and we use that every day. So the place to look, for both the creative energy and knowledge of form, is not some extraneous template, but the material that you’re bursting to express.

I am, of course, assuming that you have material to express. You might have picked up this book because you like the colour of its binding. The chances are, however, that you have stories, or a sense of the presence of stories, and you want to have a go at shaping them into a script. If you’re simply hoping to try your luck at becoming a professional scriptwriter because the money sounds good and the parties look fun, then either find something else to do that might reward your labours with more alacrity or have a scout around your psyche for a story. You won’t get far without one.

It may be, however, that you have already written something. And that there was something about it which jumped out at you, crackling with vitality, while something else crouched in a corner refusing to join in. Maybe your plot convulsed into knots around the midway mark. Or your central character never got beyond slouching around in an existentialist angst more interesting to him than to anyone paying good money to watch it. Or you sat back at the end of your efforts to realise that you’d written about everything except the thing you wanted to write about. You’ve gone back over it. You’ve tweaked and nudged, deleted and added, but the more you struggled, the worse it got. And when your manuscript thudded, finally, into the corner of your room, it might have joined a pile of previous thuddings.

And now you’re asking why. Why didn’t it work? Why does the story sag and the dialogue sound leaden? Why does that heart-pounding finale you spent 86 pages building up to fall flat? These are good questions, because they indicate that you understand story and recognise that what you’ve written doesn’t quite match up to the intrinsic, natural, even commonplace sense of narrative so integral to our human sensibilities.

In this book you will find many questions. Sometimes there are more questions than answers. And when there are answers you should take them only as indicators pointing out some possible places to look. Do take the time to ponder the puzzles. In the end, every writer will find, feel and frame the answers in their own way, in their own terms, according to the infinite variety of nature and experience. This is important because your writing should be yours, not somebody else’s. The answers you find will come from the knowledge and the creativity that reside in you and you alone.

So let’s begin our journey. Our destination is the moment when a story unfolds on the page in front of you, vividly, beautifully and surprisingly, because that is the only way it can. You’re not struggling to find the words. You’re struggling to keep up with them. You’re not putting speech into the mouths of characters. They’re telling you what they want to say. And they’re saying things you didn’t even know you knew. You’ve probably had that moment. And you want it again. It’s what keeps most writers that I know writing.

ONCE UPON A TIME

IN YOUR HEAD

It is said that fish have no awareness of the water in which they swim, although one suspects that a change in temperature, consistency and condition would send a shiver through their scales. The water doesn’t just support them, it informs them; which for a fish, predatory or otherwise, is likely to matter. The principle here is that the medium in which they move is so ubiquitous to their existence that, unless they’re dragged out of it, they never think of it as an entity separate from themselves. (Whether or not fish think about anything at all is not a question into which we shall digress.) In the same way, it can be argued that we are so surrounded by stories, so supported and informed by them, that we hardly notice their existence as anything separate from us.

From as early we can remember, there will have been stories. We might have heard them told by our parents, or grandparents. We might have pondered the squiggly lines in picture books, waiting for someone to read them out. There’s a good chance that they greeted us on our first day at school, and smiled from the shelves of a classroom library. Throughout our lives they will have marched across television screens, not just in the programmes flagged up as ‘drama’, but in news items, sports reportage, idents and ad breaks. We might have pursued them in cinemas, or theatres. We will have unfolded them across the pages of a newspaper, and pored over them in books.

Stories provide some important services. They’re a device to keep the kids quiet, tell us about the world, shape the way we think, and make us buy things. Good marketing tells us not simply what a product does, but how it fits our ‘narrative’. More powerfully, perhaps, stories uphold the great belief systems. Moses didn’t just announce the Ten Commandments, he staggered down the mountain with them. Prophecy without a bit of thunder and lightning is merely prediction. And it’s a dull sermon without parables. Getting your message across, therefore, whether it’s a tin of beans or the meaning of life, needs story.

So we know what stories are. And, even if we listen to them without much concern for the technicalities of narrative structure, we know a good one when we hear it.

Before we proceed, a cautionary note. If fish only understand the presence of water once they’re out of it, so we need to step outside of story to perceive its workings. And, like a fish out of water, this can be an uncomfortable experience. In the long term, as aesthetes rather than ordinary consumers, we may develop a different kind of appreciation for good material, but we become harder to seduce.

I was startled once, on a research visit round a Russian mortuary, to see a pin-up calendar in the staff lounge. How, I wondered, can anyone spend their tea-break leering at a human body having just spent the morning slicing them up? Surely there’s a moment when you know too much of the grisly innards ever to be enchanted by its outward form. But as writers we need, like pathologists, to step beyond our sensitivities, past the obvious charms of a bikini-clad drama posing for our dubious pleasure, to a deeper kind of beauty. After a while we will find that what makes up story, that finely tuned, powerful assembly of dramatic elements, is as beautiful as the story itself.

Consider the following questions (you might have asked them already). Although unnecessary for the average consumer of story, they do help us to see past the pin-up. Dig in a little. Try to get an eye on that great sea of stories in which you swim on a daily basis – in which you have swum for as long as you can remember.

•  Why do we want or need stories?

•  Why are stories to be found through all ages, across all cultures, from the most ‘primitive’ to the most ‘developed’?

•  Why are storytellers among the first to be silenced by totalitarian regimes? Are they a threat? To what? How?

•  What happens to a conversation when somebody starts to tell a story?

•  What happens to us when we hear a story?

•  On a personal level, are there stories that have moved and changed us?

•  Why do we connect with stories from childhood right through to the end of our days?

•  Do we recollect stories from an early age that have stayed with us?

•  Has a story ever changed the way we think about something?

•  Has a story ever changed the way we think about ourselves?

•  Can we imagine a life or world without stories? What would that be like?

Apart from pondering these myself (anything to put off actually writing!), I have occasionally offered them to writing groups. Here are a few of the most frequent responses, a list which is not intended to be definitive. Before reading on, take a moment to jot down, or think about, your own answers. Return to the questions from time to time – especially if you’re feeling tired, or jaded. It may take you back to why you wanted to do this in the first place. At the very least it will open your eyes again to the extraordinary power of this art.

STORIES TELL US ABOUT THE WORLD

Thus Downton Abbey gives us an insight into the machinations of an Edwardian country house. Lincoln opens the door to a crucial moment in history, the ramifications of which we might otherwise not fully acknowledge. Through various movies and TV shows, we can find ourselves observers of the world of boiler rooms, hedge-fund trading, the English Civil War, opium dealing, the low-rise projects of Baltimore, and space stations. Aficionados of medical dramas could probably, after a season or two, perform an accomplished Heimlich Manoeuvre or tracheotomy. Fans of courtroom series might be tempted to conduct their own defence – although this would be inadvisable.

The stories we watch or read enable us to peek into corners of the world from which we might normally be excluded. And we are inquisitive creatures. Our progress and survival, both as individuals and as a species, depend on it. In this way, stories maintain the narrative of humanity, a tradition as ancient and vital as the epic poem and the wandering troubadour. It’s also fun to spend a little time vicariously walking the beat, or in the company of notorious people, or standing up for liberty in some far-flung colonial outpost.

STORIES TELL US ABOUT OURSELVES

Shakespeare described story in terms of a mirror in which we can see all that’s good in us, all that denies the good, and the prevailing ideas which influence our thoughts and actions. Thus, story can reveal to us the great virtues of courage, trust, loyalty, dignity and so on, along with their shabbier cousins of spite, envy, cowardice, arrogance, etc. When Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street, said that greed is good, echoing a potent idea of the day, we saw past its glitter to the tawdry consequences of uninhibited avarice. When Dr King Schultz decided to shoot Calvin Candie rather than shake his hand (Django Unchained), we were invited to ponder the fine balance of integrity and self-preservation.

‘Story’ derives from a word related to ‘wisdom’. Wisdom necessitates some degree of self-awareness. It is this attribute of self-awareness, of reflection, that distinguishes us from the other animals with whom we share (often not very well) our eco-system. It is an idea built into the very name we give ourselves as a species. Homo sapiens means a thinking man, with ‘sapiens’ related to self-awareness. Story, then, is not just a tool that we use, but essential to who we are. This might go some way to explaining why tyrants burn books and, eventually, the people who write them. It also elevates the role of story from idle diversion to the realisation of our identity and function as human beings.

RITUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

We pride ourselves on our individuality (‘I am not a number’), but there is a pleasure to be had in the subsummation of our sometimes brittle singularity into the collective strength of a greater good. Which is why we congregate sometimes, as pigeons do and pandas don’t, in sports stadiums, places of worship, and cinemas. In Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins, playing the eponymous hero, stands outside the auditorium listening for every gasp and shriek. His film Psycho has transformed a roomful of fidgeting bodies into a group of people sharing a single, collective sense of terror. But this could equally be a sense of joy, or wonder, or any other human emotion. Aside from moments of crisis, our feelings can often be muted, generalised, and woven so closely with a host of other emotions that we hardly feel moved at all. In the auditorium, those feelings, amplified through shared experience, can be savoured afresh, however old or cynical we might have become; feelings like momma used to make. That is the power of cinema, and a large part of its delight.

Television brings us together in smaller units, but can still be shared beyond the family sofa through social media, water-cooler camaraderie and a general buzz. It enables us to connect with the Zeitgeist, to be more than an inconsequential mote in a pitiless universe. The function of the writer is to provide the ritual, the moment, the mechanism around which the many can gather into one. Put simply, when watching a play, movie or TV show, or when listening to the radio or reading a book, we are not alone.

STORIES SPEAK FOR US

I sometimes joke that there are three perks to being a writer. The first is the parties. The second is that there is no such thing as a bad experience; only story material. The third is that you get to poke about in areas of the world closed to people who don’t normally belong there. I have sat in the backs of police cars, in the fronts of ambulances, roamed the corridors of a prison, talked to soldiers, nurses, rescue workers, specialist lawyers and engineers of various descriptions. Of course, you have to clear your credentials, but once you’re through the door it’s quite astonishing how willing people are to talk. They do so because we all need to be heard, to be validated. The forces of oblivion are as potent as the forces of creativity, and if we don’t all teeter on the edge of disappearing for ever, perhaps a residual panic at being left behind while the tribe moves on haunts our most primordial instincts.

Blackbirds sing for various reasons: to sound the alarm, declare their territory, announce the dawn, and call for a mate. The human repertoire might be more extensive (or the same, but more nuanced); nevertheless, even those who are not ‘writers’ will know the occasional urgency of a necessary message.

Sometimes it’s straightforward enough: Man Overboard, Officer Down, Help. These aren’t statements to be refined, reordered or calibrated for delivery. But a child running in to tell Mum of a slow worm in the bushes is also driven by need. We know this imperative. Its expression requires no effort. In fact, we have no choice but to tell it. Our words, gestures and intonation are animated by its passion, and just as the blackbird has no choice but to sing, so we find ourselves not commanding, but at the command of, language. At this level of communication, there is no question of technique, or room for doubt. This is a great place to write from, if you can get there. You get there by having something that needs to be said.

A particular instance of communication might pertain to individual circumstances, but communication itself belongs to us all. The survival and progress of our family, tribe and species depend upon the swift delivery of message. It might be a cry of ‘Fire!’. It might be some profound consideration of an intellectual detail. But it runs like a stream through our genetic imprint. It is a part of being alive, written, like the song of birds, into the package.

TALKING OF INTANGIBLES...

You can’t measure love, courage, trust, jealousy or rage – except, perhaps, by their influence upon our actions. You certainly can’t bottle or tin them. So how do we experience them?

We only have to be barged aside in a queue to understand the meaning of ‘fair play’. A parking ticket issued when the yellow lines were obscured by litter can leave us in no doubt as to the importance of justice. And if the concept of ‘Truth’ can have philosophers, scientists and theologians beating each other over the head with academic papers, we know it’s uncomfortable to lie, and we appreciate honesty when somebody offers it.

Stories can evoke the great intangibles without the penalty of a parking ticket, or the hazards of an actual firing squad. By conjuring an aesthetic representation of the real world, they provide an opportunity to experience its material from the safety of our seats.

At the same time, we can savour, through stories, subtle experiences for which there isn’t a word, or for which no single word will do. This is what distinguishes stories from essays, academic analyses or sermons. The latter can speak of these matters. Story invites us to live them.

This is why the great stories can never quite be pinned down through analysis. It is also why different people experience the same piece in different ways, or why the same person might experience it differently at different times. Their meanings are so deeply rooted, sometimes beyond the boundaries of language, that they can shift, at any given time, according to the contours of our inner landscape. The storyteller may strive to guide that inner landscape, but only up to a point. The release of powerful writing invites the participation of its recipient. Sometimes even the writer cannot express the meaning of the piece except by the piece itself. What drives the communication is the intuitive sense that it needs to be.

FUN

Drama is also playful. In fact, you might have noticed that a play is called a play. So it should delight, surprise, startle and perhaps even creep us out.

When my son was about six years old I took him on set to watch a bit of filming. This was a Sunday morning on the streets of Bristol and the scene involved an undercover police officer chasing a bag-snatcher across some traffic lights, nearly getting hit by a vehicle in the process. The local police had been informed and we were able to control the lights as needed. Gloriously, a police car from an outside district was passing through, stopped at the lights and observed the chase. They swung round the traffic, hit the siren, and chased down the two actors, one of whom turned to them and said, ‘It’s alright, officer, it’s just pretend.’ At which point they noticed the camera crew.

My son understood this. Pretend is what he played with his friends. What thrilled him on this occasion was that all these grown-ups spent their professional lives behaving like kids. When a teacher asked him, not long after, what his dad did for a living, he replied, ‘Being Silly.’

So can a serious thing be silly, and a silly thing be serious? Why do children play and some people never grow out of it? I’ll leave you with those! Just remember that drama has an element of joy about it. It should be fun. Sometimes stories are used to teach a lesson, or raise an issue. I once used a medical character to berate the government about health privatisation. Useful as a diatribe can be at times, there comes a point when it’s no longer drama. Play, in the end, is for the sake of play. And if recent research suggests that children swing on swings to develop the balance mechanism of their inner ears, that’s unlikely to be on their mind when they’re doing it.

ENTERTAINMENT

By ‘entertainment’ we mean holding the attention. That attention is always somewhere. Often it’s sauntering around the catacombs of twisted neuroses, deepest fears, petty anxieties and minor worries. Our responsibility, as writers, is to rescue the audience from all that plagues them. In our care, they can be free for a few minutes – or ninety. If you lose their attention, even for a second, it leaps back to the mortgage, the homework, the boss, the athlete’s foot and the cat’s fleas. Which they’ll blame you for.